American Decency has posted online a video from its ” February morning of challenge and perspective”, held a couple of weeks ago at the Alpen Rose, in Holland MI. It was an odd pairing of speakers:
Diet Eman, World War II Christian resistance member. As a young Dutch woman, Diet risked everything to rescue imperiled Jews in Nazi-occupied Holland during World War II. Diet was eventually caught by the Nazis and was sent to a concentration camp. Many of you are familiar with her life, story, and testimony!
Kamal Saleem is a bold warrior for Christ. (See our previous mailing about his testimony: a former Islamic terrorist – now a follower of Jesus.)
Eman, who is 92, is a respected figure, and she is known in evangelical circles as the author of Things We Couldn’t Say and as an associate of Corrie ten Boom. As one would expect, advancing years have not diminished her ability to give a moving and engaging first-hand account of life under Nazi occupation and of efforts to protect Jews.
Saleem, by grim contrast, is a ranting huckster who has been comprehensively exposed. As usual, his speech outlined all-encompassing Muslim plot to take over the United States: named Muslims involved with Homeland Security and the US government (such as Huma Abedin) were denounced as “terrorists”; Mike Bloomberg has been “bought by Islamic money”; the government is working to remove details of the Holy Land Foundation trial from the internet; Ramadan is a “Holy Day” (or maybe “holiday”) at the White House, and Obama is “sabotaging” the USA’s borders; etc., etc. The fact that this clownish performance followed Eman’s speech made it a particularly distasteful spectacle.
Saleem in particular also warned about “professors in Christian colleges” who are “fighting against Christianity” on behalf of Islam – presumably he has in mind Doug Howard, a professor at Calvin College who debunked Saleem’s fake “ex-terrorist” biography in a review for Books and Culture, a sister magazine to Christianity Today.
The two speeches also highlighted an interesting generational shift in evangelicalism towards a militant religious nationalism. Eman lamented how difficult it is to get Jews to accept Jesus, and she commended the work of Jews for Jesus; Saleem, by contrast, was more interested in how Christianity was the means by which the USA shares in the blessings given to the chosen nation of Israel. Saleem also explained that there were “seven mountains of influence” that have been infiltrated – the “seven mountains” is a well-known trope of a “dominionist” trend within neo-Pentecostalism, and Saleem has close links with Rick Joyner. Saleem also claimed that his family derived from a Jewish Arabian tribe that had converted to Islam in the distant past; oddly, Walid Shoebat also recently felt the need to stress an ancient genealogical link to Jews.
Ed Brayton, who lives in Michigan, explains that American Decency is “a tiny group of cranks that is little more than PO Box and a guy with an email address”.
UPDATE: American Decency has also posted a video of Saleem speaking at Grand Rapids. The man introducing him dismissed all the evidence debunking his claims on the grounds that Saleem has shared a stage with Gen. Jerry Boykin. There was one example of this in March last year, when Saleem explained to Boykin and Rick Joyner on Joyner’s Prophetic Perspectives show about how Muslims were supposedly defacing dollar bills.
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